Italian Parliament

1 Introduction

To anyone watching from abroad, Italian politics probably looks like chaos. Since 1946, Italy has burned through nearly 70 different governments, which works out to one every 13 months or so. The system was built after Mussolini to make sure no one could grab too much power, but it has caused decades of fragile coalitions and political conflicts.

As two Italians, we’ve grown up watching the same cycle play out.

But the current legislature, the XIX, is actually different, and what makes it worth studying is that for the first time, there’s a genuine majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Now, instead of asking “will this government make it to next month?”, we can actually ask “what is it actually doing?”

And it turns out Parliament generates a lot of data including electronic vote, committee session, and draft bill so we wanted to look at what the numbers show and organized our analysis around three questions:

1. Who’s in the room? The Chamber was reduced to 400 seats this legislature. What does that mean for representation? Is it more women, fewer women? Are Southern regions still underrepresented compared to the North?

2. When does Parliament actually work? There’s a running “fallacy” that MPs only show up Tuesday through Thursday. Is that true? Can we see it in the voting timestamps?

3. How do parties actually vote? Coalition partners are supposed to vote together, and the opposition is supposed to oppose. But how messy is the reality? Who breaks ranks, and at what stage of the voting?